TL;DR: Blood Shine is a slow, bloody religious horror movie with a terrific performance from Emily Bennett and some excellent practical gore - it takes a while to get where it is going, but once it gets there, I found it disturbing, strange, and much more interesting than your average cult movie.
Plot
In her remote country home, a religious zealot takes a young filmmaker captive, claiming her sadistic rituals will change him into a god.
Blood Shine Is A Very Strange Little Horror Movie
Blood Shine is the sort of folk horror movie where you will probably spend some time wondering exactly how far Emily Bennett and Justin Brooks were prepared to take their ideas, before the movie eventually answers that question with a fairly enthusiastic bucket of blood - this is a small film too, but it has some pretty big ideas about religion, control, abuse, faith, and the things people will do when they become completely convinced that they have discovered the truth.
Bennett and Brooks wrote and directed the movie together, and Bennett also plays Clara, which turns out to be a very good decision because Clara is easily the most interesting person in the film, where she is frightening, but she isn't played as some screaming lunatic who spends the entire movie announcing how evil she is, as she is more calm, polite, sometimes almost sweet, and then she does something absolutely horrible.
Emily Bennett Is Excellent As Clara
Clara is an interesting character to watch, simply because she doesn't see herself as somebody doing terrible things, as in her head, there's a purpose behind everything, where she has found something she believes is bigger than herself, and she thinks she has a duty to bring other people into it.
There is also something much darker about somebody who thinks they're helping you while they're hurting you than somebody who knows they're being cruel, because at least with a straightforward villain, everyone understands the arrangement, but here, Clara doesn't.
She can sit there talking quite calmly about her beliefs while doing things that would have most of us running for the nearest exit, preferably one located several counties away, while Bennett also gives Clara moments where I almost felt sorry for her, which I wasn't expecting from a character doing some truly awful things.
The movie suggests that she has her own history of being controlled and abused, and there is an ugly logic to the way she has turned that experience into something she now inflicts on other people, with that idea of control running through the film.
Read some more horror movie content:
The Visual Effects Are Good
The movie is called Blood Shine, so I suppose I shouldn't have been shocked when it became very bloody, still, some of this stuff is rough, as the film has several scenes involving physical violence and self-inflicted injuries, and the practical effects are one of its strongest technical features.
The practical effects were handled by effects artist Brian Spears, whose credits include American Horror Story and Smile 2, which helps explain why the gore looks considerably better than you might expect from a small independent production, but I also liked that the blood actually belongs to the movie's ideas - it isn't just there because somebody remembered that horror audiences like gore, as the violence is part of Clara's beliefs, which makes the scenes feel connected to the story rather than randomly thrown in.
The Slow Pace Is Both Good And Bad
I like slow horror, and I have absolutely no problem with a movie taking its time, especially when it's trying to build an uncomfortable relationship between two characters, but the light problem here I had is that Blood Shine occasionally takes the scenic route when the road is perfectly straight.
A lot of the movie stays in and around Clara's home, with long conversations and repeated rituals, where those scenes are good, simply because Bennett and Call are strong enough to carry them, and the strange relationship between Clara and Brighton becomes more interesting as it develops, but other times you want it move ahead a little bit quicker, too.
That's probably why the film has received such mixed reactions from what I have read, as you're either on board with this type of pacing or you aren't, and for me, the slow pace mostly works because Clara is interesting, but I will admit at times it did bother me a bit.
Larry Fessenden Is Exactly Right For This
And then we have Larry Fessenden - at this point, putting Larry Fessenden into a strange independent horror movie feels like the cinematic equivalent of finding a raccoon in your kitchen, and here, Fessenden plays the cult's leader, appearing through recordings that influence Clara and the way she understands the world, and he's excellent.
There's something wonderfully creepy about the way he delivers the character's teachings too - he's calm, confident and reassuring, which makes the things he's saying considerably worse, and Fessenden is also one of the most familiar faces in American independent horror, with credits ranging from The Last Winter and The Innkeepers to more recent appearances in MaXXXine.
The Ending Finally Gets Properly Weird
The final section is where Blood Shine earns some credit back for the slower parts, as while the movie starts out looking like a fairly straightforward captivity story, eventually it becomes something far stranger, and the ending doesn't simply wrap everything up and explain exactly what Clara's beliefs mean either, as it pushes the religious ideas further and leaves some room for interpretation.
The ending won't work for everyone, and I can understand why some will find it disappointing, but for me, it was one of the better parts of the film because it finally allowed Blood Shine to become as strange as its ideas suggested it could be.
Final Thoughts
Blood Shine has some issues, but it also has enough going for it too - Emily Bennett is excellent, the gore is properly good, Larry Fessenden is perfectly cast, and the film has some genuinely interesting things to say about belief and control - I liked it more for being strange and uncomfortable than for being conventionally 'scary'.